


new york, 2018

by purplefennels7



Series: new york in ashes [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Death, I Believe in Jasper Sitwell, Jasper Sitwell is Not Hydra, M/M, Married Couple, Panic Attacks, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), my usual spiel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-07-19 05:49:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19969045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purplefennels7/pseuds/purplefennels7
Summary: Jasper's already lost Nick once, and they'd sworn not to do that again, to go off and die without a proper goodbye. Evidently, the universe has had it in for him all along.





	new york, 2018

**Author's Note:**

> a nick/jasper iw fic that tragically follows canon. i listened to _the band perry_ the whole time i was writing it but i don't know if it means anything.  
> jasper isn't hydra etc etc. welcome to rarepair hell.

_new york, 2018._

Jasper’s working on dinner when he hears the first crash. At first he doesn’t even recognize it for what it is; after spending nearly four years living in the downtown apartment he and Nick had moved into ever since Jasper was walking well enough to be discharged from medical, he’s discovered that a far-off car crash is remarkably easy to ignore when he isn’t paying enough attention. Anyway, this is Manhattan and if you don’t hear a car crash at least once a week, that might be a cause for concern. 

He turns back to stirring the soup just as the screech of metal grinding against metal rings through the air again, this time sounding like it’s directly under the building. By the time he’s turned off the stove burner and has made it over to the window, the remains of what looks like a five-car pileup is strewn across the street below like all the drivers had lost control at the same time.

“Fuck,” he says, a cold knot of dread settling in his gut. All of Manhattan had seen the donut-shaped spaceship appear above the city two days prior, and the subsequent disappearance of first Tony Stark and then the rest of the former Avengers had resulted in an impromptu strategy meeting with Hill and May and Coulson all clustered around Jasper and Nick’s little kitchen table. Jasper would put a lot of money on the fact that whatever the hell is going on, whoever was the owner of that spaceship is involved.

Even four years after being thrown into the path of an oncoming truck by the Winter Soldier, Jasper’s leg isn’t what it used to be. It takes him a good five minutes to get down to street level, and when he emerges out of the stairwell he finds the entire street clogged with cars, sitting eerily still amid the smoggy air. He takes a second to scan the street for the black Hummer he knows Nick and Maria had taken out in the morning; he wouldn’t put it past Nick to end up in an accident three feet from their front door. There’s no sign of it, though, and he lets himself pause and breathe and try and loosen the tightness in his chest before making his way over to the nearest car to investigate.

There’s no one inside, only a cell phone lying abandoned in the centre console and a fine layer of dust coating the interior.

“Uh,” Jasper says intelligently, brain refusing to process what he’s seeing. He rushes over to the next car down, only to find the same scene: a bottle of soda overturned, sugary liquid soaking into the floor mats with the same coating of dust over everything.

A squeal of tires sounds in his ears in the next second, and he throws himself out of the way just in time for a sedan to careen through where he was just standing and slam into a light post. Jasper watches in horror as the form of the driver dissolves before his eyes. By the time he wrenches the warped door open, there’s nothing left.

“Fuck,” he says again, stumbling backwards from the incomprehensible scene, dread solidifying into dizzying terror. “Fuck, _Nick-_ ” 

His back impacts the nearest car hard enough to bruise, but he barely feels it as he wrenches his phone from his pocket, hands shaking so badly he nearly misses speed dial. 

“Please,” he whispers as he listens to it ring. “Please don’t do this.” 

No one picks up on the first try, or the second, or the third. Jasper’s running by the fourth, darting between the crowds slowly gathering on the sidewalks, glasses slipping down his nose, searching for the street corner that had been in the last picture Maria had sent, of them sitting at a stoplight with Nick glaring at the camera and Maria with a maniacal grin on her face. He tries Maria, too - maybe Nick’s driving, maybe he’s seen the same thing Jasper’s seeing and he’s calling code red already. Maybe anything, if it means he’s safe.

No answer.

“ _Damn_ it, Hill,” he curses, blinking away the hot tears threatening to blur the words on the signs he’s running past. Every street he passes is the same carnage filling the street in front of their apartment, people dissolving away right there in broad daylight. He shoves down the urge to vomit and runs on, heart thumping out a staccato beat against his ribcage. They’re fine. They’re just occupied with something.

They have to be. He can’t lose Nick again.

He finds the car a block and a half from the intersection, parked on the street perfectly parallel to the curb, and for a heartstopping moment he thinks everything will be alright. 

“Nick? Maria?” he shouts, heading for the drivers’ side door, fear and adrenaline forcing one foot in front of the other. “What have I fucking _said_ about-” 

He breaks off, throat closing over. The car is empty, but pristine - no evidence of the telltale coating of dust.

“Nick?” he yells again, spinning around to look through the mess of crashed cars and dusty air, air that he realizes with a lurch of his stomach is dusty because of people’s ashes. “Maria?” 

A glimpse of something silver from underneath a car catches his eye, and he goes sprinting over, vaults across the hood in his haste and is reminded why he doesn’t do that anymore - and then all thoughts of the pain are chased from his mind because that’s Nick’s fucking pager. The one that he saves for the utmost contingency, the one Jasper had picked up out of Nick’s jacket pocket one night and ended hearing about Nick’s old friend Carol for the rest of the evening.

“She sounds scary,” Jasper had said, leaning back against Nick’s chest. He’d only half been joking. “Think she’d give me a shovel talk? She sounds pretty fond of you.” 

“The world would be _ending_ , Jas,” Nick had replied, looking just this side of fondly exasperated. “Pretty sure we’d have bigger problems.” 

“Let’s, uh, avoid the apocalypse for a bit longer, kay? Not that I don’t wanna meet your friend, but, you know, apocalypse.” Nick had rolled his eyes and then kissed him, and Jasper had pretended not to notice when he’d held him a little tighter when they were falling asleep.

Jasper bends numbly to pick it up, the blue-and-gold star pattern glowing faintly on the screen. When he straightens back up, pager a dead weight in his hand, he notices the car door is open and there’s fingerprints disturbing the neat layer of dust on the inside.

“Maria,” he chokes, voice cracking, clutching the pager like a lifeline. “Nick, oh _god_ , Nick, you motherfucker, we said no more dying!”

The last part comes out as a splintered shout and Jasper collapses back against the side of the car, staring blankly out at the street and seeing nothing at all.

Something flips over inside of him, and then he’s pulling his phone out and dialling without thinking, praying and praying under his breath that someone picks up, that more than just him has made it through this, this horror. He can’t be the only one left.

May picks up on the third ring, and Jasper exhales a breath that sounds dangerously close to a sob.

“Melinda, thank god.”

“Jasper? What’s wrong?” she asks, instantly alert.

“Mel, you’ve gotta come down, I’m in New York, Nick’s-” He can’t bring himself to say _dead_ , can’t make it true, not again. “-gone.”

“What the fuck - Jasper, are you alright?”

“No,” he replies sharply, biting back a sob, biting down on his lip hard enough to bleed. “People are dying down here, Mel, just turning to dust, like a house of fucking horrors, and my fucking _husband_ is missing, and oh, did I mention he used his pager? No, this is not okay!” 

“Okay, Jasper, just breathe, breathe for me alright?” Melinda sounds a little panicked herself, tight undercurrent running through her voice, and under any other circumstance he would feel bad. No matter how long he’s been out of the field he’s still an agent and agents don’t panic, but this is the furthest from normal he thinks he’s ever been and he’s man enough to admit he’s kind of freaking out. It takes him a moment to register that Melinda’s talking again, saying something about coordinates and Virginia and extraction, and he jerks himself back to reality.

“Look, Jasper, do you have a car? It’s easier for you to come to us than it is for us to come to you.” Jasper looks over at the car Nick and Maria had been driving, and nods even though he knows she can’t see him.

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “Yeah, I’ve got a car. Send me the coordinates once I’m in the air. Sitwell out.” He hangs up before Melinda can reply, and lets himself flop bonelessly against the pavement and press the heels of his hands against his eyes, willing back the tears. Nick had _said_ , sitting in a chair beside Jasper’s hospital bed, he’d _said_ no more dying and Jasper had agreed, squeezed his hand as best he could, _if you don’t then I won’t either._ And every SHIELD agent worth their salary knows not to make promises like that but Jasper had hoped that maybe, just maybe they could beat the odds. 

He sits there for one more minute, counting his breaths and trying not to break down because he knows that if he does he’ll never come back up. And then he gets up and heads back to Nick and Maria’s car even though his legs are wobbly and he feels a little like he’s about to fall over. He finds the keys still in the ignition, and when he sees the little black cat keychain dangling from the ring he can’t hold back a choking sob, all the equilibrium he’d scrounged together vanishing in an instant.

“ _God,_ Nick,” he whispers, grips the sides of the driver’s seat until his knuckles go white and tries to forget that he’s sitting where Nick had been not thirty minutes prior, probably rolling his eyes at Maria’s dad jokes and swearing at people for not using their turn signals and alive, _fuck_ , alive and here and everything Jasper spent years thinking he couldn’t have, tries and fails not to remember that Nick is _gone_ and Jasper’s unmoored, set adrift with nothing to hold onto and fuck but he’s _terrified._

“Jasper?” Melinda’s voice drops sudden and shocking into the silence, and somehow it shakes something inside him, extinguishes the little spark of hope still flickering bravely along, and he can do nothing but double over in a soundless cry, rubbing his fingers along the ridge of his wedding ring over and over until everything narrows down to the metal under his skin and his own breath heavy in his ears. Melinda is saying his name in the background, again and again, screaming it, maybe, but it all pales in comparison to the roaring in his ears, his brain stuttering over _Nick_ and _dead_ and _lost_ and _promised_ until the words blur together and everything swirls up into a single glaring point _gone._

And Jasper falls, and lets the blackness take him.

* * *

Melinda finds him, after it all, curled in the seat of Nick’s car, glasses smeared with ash, a tear track still etched in dust across his face. 

“Jasper,” she says, softly, but instead of the pity he expects her voice is edged with steel, and he loves her a little for it. “Up.” And then she reaches right into the car and pulls him out of his seat, none too gently but she lets him hold onto her arm all the way back to the car she’s brought and doesn’t comment when he has to sit and shake for a moment before he pulls his seatbelt on. In turn, he manages not to follow her gaze when she turns to look back at Nick and Maria’s car before she punches the engines, and when she inhales like she’s holding back a sob he puts his hand atop hers for a second and puts in the coordinates to the helicarrier himself.

Phil meets them in the hangar bay of the helicarrier, and Jasper has to stop and breathe in relief because that’s one more friend safe, that’s one more person he hasn’t lost yet.

“Jasper,” he says, and then Jasper finds himself being hugged. They’ve only done this one other time, when Phil had found out Jasper was alive and held him tight enough for his still-healing ribs to hurt and Jasper had winced and then laughed and then laughed some more at the look on Nick’s face, and when Jasper leans into him he finds both of them shaking. 

“I’m glad you made it,” he says when Phil lets him go, and he receives a wobbly smile that looks exactly how he feels.

They set up shop in Phil’s office on the bridge, big plate glass windows unobscured by tinting because in the face of this no amount of privacy is enough, so why bother? The reports are still rolling in from SHIELD’s network across the globe, a little weaker than it was five years ago but still accurate enough to show the extent of the horror - half the planet is just gone, turned to so much ash, and another ten percent gone down in planes suddenly without pilots, cars suddenly without drivers, patients mid-surgery without doctors to close them up. There’s still no sign of the Avengers, just a sudden burst of unfathomable energy from Wakanda and nothing since, and Jasper can’t miss how Phil keeps toying with his shirt right over the place he knows he keeps his wedding ring so they haven’t heard from Clint either. 

And in the face of everything all of their gazes keep flickering to the two empty seats at the head of the table; even though Phil is Director he’s always left the seat open for Nick and Nick had always taken it, until now. Even when everything there is to be talked about has been already, they linger there, the three of them where there should be five, watching the screens change and the death toll rise higher and higher and being entirely conscious of the ghosts in the room with them until it just all becomes too much.

Jasper rises to his feet, shoves his chair back until it hits the wall with a bang, and it’s a testament to how caught up in their own minds they are when all three of them, even him, jump at the noise. With two pairs of eyes on him and the only ghosts that matter tracking his movements, he slips his ring from his left fourth finger and sets it down on the table. The clack of metal against glass sounds too loud in the quiet.

“They’re gone,” he says, and his voice is steady and cold. “We don’t know how many or who, not yet,” and here he looks apologetically over at Phil, whose mouth is set in a grim line, “but they are, and we have to go on.” He picks up his ring again, turns it in his hands and watches the light glint off the engraving. 

“Here,” Phil says suddenly, moving to his desk and pulling a slim metal chain out of the top drawer, identical to the one around his own neck except in silver instead of gold. Jasper nods, takes it and slips the ring on and fastens it around his neck, tucks it under the collar of his shirt and feels the cold steel settle against his chest. He inclines his head at Phil and Melinda and presses his hand against his breastbone to feel the indent of the ring in his skin, and knows Nick is there with him. 

“We have to go on.”

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on tumblr [@romanovnat](https://romanovnat.tumblr.com)  
> id love u forever for comments and kudos


End file.
